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Budget Titles Dominate 2025's Top-Rated Games as AAA Prices Climb To $80

Monday May 5, 2025. 04:40 PM , from Slashdot
Budget Titles Dominate 2025's Top-Rated Games as AAA Prices Climb To $80
The highest-rated video games of 2025 are all budget-priced titles, with Metacritic top performers Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince, and Split Fiction costing just $50, $30, and $50 respectively. This comes as Microsoft announces certain Xbox titles will now cost $80, following Nintendo's similar price hike for Mario Kart on Switch 2.

Clair Obscur, developed by a small French studio, sold 1 million copies in its first week. Split Fiction, despite being published by EA, was created by a small Stockholm team and has reached 2 million sales. Blue Prince, a puzzle-roguelike largely created by a single developer in Los Angeles, is showing strong performance on Steam, Bloomberg reports.

All three games share key traits: they use commercially available engines, take creative risks that big-budget projects couldn't afford, and target specific player demographics rather than trying to appeal broadly. The contrast is striking -- Clair Obscur's developers celebrated reaching 1 million sales while EA declared Dragon Age: The Veilguard a failure with similar numbers, underscoring the economic realities of different development scales.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/05/05/073207/budget-titles-dominate-2025s-top-rated-games-as-aaa...

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